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My father looks at me again, his face ashen as I train my glare on him. “Why?”
“Dante,” he pleads, his arms held out in surrender.
I shoot him in the kneecap, and he howls in pain, clutching onto his injured knee as he curses at me.
“You know how many bones there are in the human body, Pop? I will shatter every single one if you don’t start giving me some answers. And you know I will do it because you’ve watched me do it before.”
Saliva dribbles from his mouth as he stares at me while bleeding onto his expensive carpet.
“Why did you send me after Kat?”
“Because I thought you’d kill her,” he spits. “Trust you to grow a fucking conscience at the worst possible time.”
I force down the rage that bubble in my chest. I need answers to so many things before I end his miserable life.
“But why did you want her dead?”
He licks his lips, looking at his injured leg and wincing. “She saw something she shouldn’t have. At least I think she did, but now… I don’t know.”
“When Elmo and Tony took her?”
“Yes. Stupid fucking idiots were supposed to kill any girls they took back there. They swore to me they had. But they were so hopped up on meth half the time I don’t think they knew what the fuck they were doing. When I found out she was still alive…”
“Took back where? What did she see?”
He clamps his lips together, his jaw clenched in anger.
“What did she see?” I bark as I point my gun at his other kneecap.
“Cages,” he blurts out the word. “People in cages.”
My stomach churns. I fucking knew it. I didn’t want to believe it, but a part of me knew all along. “People?” I spit. “Or children?”
“Both. Women and children.”
Bile burns the back of my throat as I’m confronted with the true nature of the evil that spawned me. “So six years ago, when Maximo and I wiped out the Santangelos and thought we’d put a stop to this vile, disgusting stain on our family’s name, all we did was cut off the tail of the snake? You were the head. I knew there was someone bigger backing Jimmy and his boys, but it was you?”
“I was supposed to bring you and Lorenzo in on it when you were old enough, but after the way you reacted when you found out about Jimmy and his boys being mixed up in it…” He shakes his head, as though he is bitterly disappointed in me.
“I wish you had tried, because I would have killed you six years ago too.”
“I’m your father,” he yells. “You would be nothing without me. Everything you have is down to me.”
“Everything I have is in spite of you. I would rather be completely broke than take any money from what you’ve been doing. Is that why you wanted me to marry Kat if I wouldn’t kill her? So that if she ever did remember seeing anything, then she’d already be my wife and you could silence her? The way you silenced Nicole?”
“I was protecting our interests.”
“But it was all for nothing. Kat didn’t see a thing. You want to know why I know that? Because she relives what your depraved animal buddies did to her over and over again and she remembers everything in perfect detail.Ifshe had seen any women and children trapped in cages, it would have torn her apart until she freed every last one of them.”
“I had no way of knowing she hadn’t seen anything. I couldn’t be sure so I had to take precautions.”
“You were willing to have me kill her just in case?” I spit at him. “Just in case she might have seen something that would expose your disgusting secret?”
“No. Because she would have exposed a multi-million-dollar operation. That is all that matters, Dante. It’s just business.”
Business?I stand and walk away from him before I pound his face to mincemeat the way I did Leo’s not so long ago.
Pacing the floor, I run a hand through my hair. “How did I not notice? Women and kids are being moved like dogs through my city and I didn’t fucking notice?”
